January 14th 2019
I wrote last year about not having any songs with Sparrow, and in fact very few conversations about music. Dylan, Prince and hip-hop generally are notable exceptions, but they're necessary rather than sufficient: if you don't think the first two are cosmic geniuses and the last is the true successor to both punk and folk then you are clearly not my people and we'll shake hands and part as nodding acquaintances.
I know why this is now. There are no songs about Sparrow. Pop songs about women fall into three categories: ones that, lazily or beautifully or nastily, encode the romantic myth; ones that, lazily or beautifully or nastily, encode a patronising, objectifying sentimental courtly lady, a personification of solace and pain about as removed from the realities of human personality as a dragon is from a worm; and finally, ones that are aren't about women at all, they just use the conventions of songs about girls to talk about something else.
There are no songs about actual women. No documents of personality. Is "So Long, Marianne" about the actual Marriane Ilhen? Is "Kim" about the actual Kim Mathers?
Nah.
And because I'm not doing the romantic myth thing or the personification thing and the last thing isn't even a thing, there are no songs I think about when I think about Sparrow.
So it's something else. A conversation, maybe. You don't get conversations set to music- well, you do in opera, but fuck that.
I wrote last year about not having any songs with Sparrow, and in fact very few conversations about music. Dylan, Prince and hip-hop generally are notable exceptions, but they're necessary rather than sufficient: if you don't think the first two are cosmic geniuses and the last is the true successor to both punk and folk then you are clearly not my people and we'll shake hands and part as nodding acquaintances.
I know why this is now. There are no songs about Sparrow. Pop songs about women fall into three categories: ones that, lazily or beautifully or nastily, encode the romantic myth; ones that, lazily or beautifully or nastily, encode a patronising, objectifying sentimental courtly lady, a personification of solace and pain about as removed from the realities of human personality as a dragon is from a worm; and finally, ones that are aren't about women at all, they just use the conventions of songs about girls to talk about something else.
There are no songs about actual women. No documents of personality. Is "So Long, Marianne" about the actual Marriane Ilhen? Is "Kim" about the actual Kim Mathers?
Nah.
And because I'm not doing the romantic myth thing or the personification thing and the last thing isn't even a thing, there are no songs I think about when I think about Sparrow.
So it's something else. A conversation, maybe. You don't get conversations set to music- well, you do in opera, but fuck that.
Maybe no songs, but perhaps a couple of Jack Gilbert poems?
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